AMD has decided to switch to a new business model focusing on customer scalability rather than competing in the flagship GPU segment.

Rumors surrounding AMD's RDNA 4 lineup claimed that the company wouldn't be going the enthusiast route with its upcoming Radeon RX 8000 "RDNA 4" GPU family, as one of the high-end Navi chips, the Navi 4C/4X got canceled during the mid-development cycle. It was supposed that Team Red had shifted its focus over to the large portion of the markets, including releasing SKUs that focused on catering to the low-to-mid segment of the industry, and now, statements by AMD's SvP and GM of the Computing and Graphics Business Group Jack Huynh, has verified this particular stance.

AMD has been involved in a race with NVIDIA in the GPU markets for quite a long now, and both companies have focused on marketing their respective portfolios as one of the most capable ones out there. Even in keynotes, we often see the flagship models, such as the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and the GeForce RTX 4090, getting more showtime, but this does put the other variants in the lineup under the shadow, and consumers often conclude their views about a particular GPU series based upon how the flagship model stacks up.

AMD is now avoiding this, which is why the firm believes that it should focus on GPU scaling now, given that this particular segment holds 80% of the market share. Team Red believes that competing with NVIDIA in the enthusiastic segment isn't doing the job for them and that by switching market targets, the firm can perform impressively.

So, my number one priority right now is to build scale, to get us to 40 to 50 percent of the market faster. Do I want to go after 10% of the TAM [Total Addressable Market] or 80%? I'm an 80% kind of guy because I don't want AMD to be the company that only people who can afford Porsches and Ferraris can buy. We want to build gaming systems for millions of users.

Yes, we will have great, great, great products. But we tried that strategy [King of the Hill] -- it hasn't really grown. ATI has tried this King of the Hill strategy, and the market share has kind of been...the market share. I want to build the best products at the right system price point. So, think about price point-wise; we'll have leadership.

- AMD's SvP and GM of the Computing and Graphics Business Group, Jack Huynh, via Tom's Hardware

Huynh says that the "King of the Hill" tactic hasn't worked out for AMD, and the firm is eager to build its portfolio that revolves around being more competitive in terms of the pricing and the value being offered instead of just maxing out on everything and providing highly-priced products. This certainly doesn't mean that Team Red won't compete in the enthusiastic segment, but with the upcoming "RX 8000" series SKUs, we will see a different approach, one that might prove to be the moment of breakout for AMD.

If you remember back when Raja Koduri took charge of the Radeon division and formed the RTG (Radeon Technologies Group), AMD implemented a similar strategy starting with Polaris & its various offspring in the Radeon RX 400 and 500 series. The first attempt at the high-end lineup, Vega, didn't bode well for the gaming segment but worked well in workstation and HPC segments.

The Polaris and Vega generations were mostly driven off the older GCN architectures while the RDNA GPUs were going to be the first real release of a post-GCN design. The RX 5000 did well and just like the RX 400/500 series before them, became hot sellers however, this time, AMD followed with a very strong RX 6000 series lineup and everyone was excited for the RX 7000 series but the final product came short of performance compared to NVIDIA's high-end offerings.

In fact, AMD stated that they could have made an RTX 4090-equivalent graphics card with the RDNA 3 architecture but it would have consumed a lot of power and would have been very expensive. RX 7000 series wasn't a hit compared to the RTX 40 series when we look at the earnings figures of both GPU vendors during 2024 with NVIDIA seeing record revenue from GPU sales while AMD's gaming side has declined a lot.

So to cut it short, this would be AMD's third try to start from the mainstream segment and scale up to high-end and enthusiast GPU segments.

Recently, we reported on how Team Red plans to decorate the RDNA 4 lineup with inspirations being taken from the RDNA 1 series, with Navi 48 "GFX1201" SKUs and a few GPUs based on the Navi 44 "GFX1200" planned out. While we are unaware of specific models, we certainly won't be surprised if AMD introduces more budget-oriented models, similar to what it sort of did with the RDNA 3 series, with the release of "GRE" variants, that did heat the budget segment.

The AMD Radeon RX 8000 "RDNA 4" GPUs are expected to debut next year at CES and the launch will be followed soon after in the coming months of the first quarter.